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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Elliott, David J. (David James), 1948– editor. | Silverman, Marissa, editor. | Bowman, Wayne D., 1947– editor.
Title: Artistic citizenship : artisty, social responsibility, and ethical praxis / David J. Elliott, Marissa Silverman, & Wayne D. Bowman.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016006024| ISBN 9780199393749 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780199393756 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780199393770 (oxford scholarly online)
Subjects: LCSH: Arts and morals. | Arts and society.
Classification: LCC NX180.E8 A78 2016 | DDC 701/.03—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016006024
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Paperback printed by WebCom, Inc., Canada
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who only has eyes, if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he is a poet, or even, if he is a boxer, just his muscles? Far from it: at the same time he is also a political being, constantly aware of the heartbreaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. How could it be possible to feel no interest in other people, and with a cool indifference to detach yourself from the very life which they bring to you so abundantly? No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.
Pablo Picasso1
You can’t talk about the struggle for human freedom unless you talk about the different dimensions of what it is to be human. And when we’re talking about art you’re talking about meaning, you’re talking about love, you’re talking about resistance, you’re talking about imagination, you’re talking about empathy. All of these are part and parcel of what it is to talk about human freedom. And so art is about those who have the courage to use bits of reality to get us to see reality, in light of a new reality. So it’s about vision by means of imagination, it’s about empathy in terms of looking through this world and seeing the possibilities of a new world, a better world, a more decent, a more compassionate world. And so be one a painter, musician, sculptor, dancer, in fact, be one a human being who aspires to learn the art of living, because in the end I think that’s what the arts are really about, how do we become, all of us become, artists of living? Which has to do with courage, which has to do with love, which has to do with justice, which has to do with leaving the world better than we found it.
C ornel West2
NOTES
1. Picasso in interview with Simone Téry, "Picasso n'est pas officier dans l'armée française," March 24, 1945, in Les Lettres Françaises [magazine published by the National Front], V, 48.
2. Taken from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=783fMZeG8Ac, October 2, 2010, at Tonatierra Nahuacalli Embassy of Indigenous People in Phoenix, Arizona. Interviewed and filmed by Ernesto Yerena.
CONTENTS
Contributors xi
PART I Foundational Considerations
1. Artistic Citizenship: Introduction, Aims, and Overview 3 by David J. Elliott, Marissa Silverman, and Wayne D. Bowman
2. Art and Citizenship: The History of a Divorce 22 by David Wiles
3. New York Reimagined: Artists, Arts Organizations, and the Rebirth of a City 41 by Mary Schmidt Campbell
4. Artistry, Ethics, and Citizenship 59 by Wayne D. Bowman
5. Arts Education as/for Artistic Citizenship 81 by Marissa Silverman and David J. Elliott
6. Art as a Bad Public Good 104 by Ana Vujanović
PART II Dance/Movement-Based Arts
7. Movement Potentials and Civic Engagement: An Interview 125 with Liz Lerman
8. Dance It, Film It, Share It: Exploring Participatory Dances and Civic Potential 146 by Sangita Shresthova
9. Moving Comfortably Between Continuity and Disruption: Somatics and Urban Dance as Embodied Responses to Civic Responsibility 163 by Naomi M. Jackson
10. Re/imagining Artivism 189 by Rodney Diverlus
PART III Media and Technology
11. Queer and Trans People of Color Community Arts Collective: Ste-Émilie Skillshare 213 by Sandra Jeppesen, Anna Kruzynski, and Coco Riot
12. Slow FAST Forward: Enacting Digital Art and Civic Opportunities 233 by Jennifer Parker
13. Tactical Citizenship: Straddling the Line Between Community and Contestation 254 by Eric Kluitenberg
14. Ghostly Testimonies: Re-enactment and Ethical Responsibility in Contemporary Israeli Documentary Cinema 272 by Raz Yosef and Yaara Ozery
PART IV Music
15. Music, Social Change, and Alternative Forms of Citizenship 297 by Thomas Turino
16. Citizens or Subjects? El Sistema in Critical Perspective 313 by Geoffrey Baker
17. Arts-Based Service Learning with Indigenous Communities: Engendering Artistic Citizenship 339 by Brydie-Leigh Bartleet and Gavin Carfoot
18. Alchemies of Sanctioned Value: Music, Networks, Law 359 by Martin Scherzinger
PART V Poetry/Storytelling
19. The Points Are Not the Point, But Do They Still Matter? A Practitioner’s Take on Spoken Word, Slam Poetry, and the Responsibility of Artists to Engage Their Audiences 381 by Kyle “Guante” Tran Myhre
20. Poet as Citizen in a Contested Nation: Rewriting the Poetry of Soviet- Occupied Afghanistan 392 by Aria Fani
21. Songs of Passage and Sacrifice: Gabriella Ghermandi’s Stories in Performance 415 by Laura Dolp and Eveljn Ferraro
PART VI Theater
22. Applied Theater and Citizenship in the Puerto Rican Community: Artistic Citizenship in Practice 447 by David T. Montgomery
23. Performing Citizenship: Performance Art and Public Happiness 469 by Sibylle Peters
24. Valuing Performance: Purposes at Play in Participatory Theater Practice 480 by Nicola Shaughnessy
25. A New Letter Named Square 513 by Coco Guzman
26. Working All the Time: Artistic Citizenship in the 21st Century 521 by Diane Mullin
27. Image as Ignorant Schoolmaster: A Lesson in Democratic Equality 549 by Tyson Lewis
Author Index 563
Subject Index 575
CONTRIBUTORS
Geoffrey Baker is a Reader in the Music Department at Royal Holloway, University of London. He specializes in music in Latin America. His book Imposing Harmony: Music and Society in Colonial Cuzco (Duke University Press, 2008) won the American Musicological Society’s Robert Stevenson Award in 2010. Together with Tess Knighton, he edited Music and Urban Society in Colonial Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2010). He also works on Latin American popular music, particularly in Cuba, Argentina, and Colombia. His book Buena Vista in the Club: Rap, Reggaetón, and Revolution in Havana (Duke University Press, 2011) was published in the series Refiguring American Music. Since 2011, he has been a research associate on the ERC/Oxford University project “Music, Digitization, Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary Music Studies,” for which he carried out fieldwork on digital cumbia and folklore in Argentina and Colombia. Baker has focused increasingly on childhood musical learning and music education in Venezuela and Cuba. He received a British Academy Research Development Award and undertook fieldwork in Venezuela in 2010–2011 on the orchestral music program El Sistema, which resulted in the book El Sistema: Orchestrating Venezuela’s Youth (Oxford University Press, 2014) and the website http://tocarypensar.com. He was coinvestigator on the 3year AHRC Beyond Text project “Growing Into Music,” for which he made a series of films about childhood music learning in Cuba and Venezuela, available online at http://growingintomusic.co.uk . For further information, please visit http://geoffbakermusic.wordpress.com
Associate Professor Brydie-Leigh Bartleet is Director of the Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre, Griffith University, Australia. She has worked on a range of national and international projects in community music, artsbased service learning with Australian First Peoples, intercultural community arts, and arts programs in prison. She convenes the conservatorium’s awardwinning Winanjjikari Service Learning Program and in 2014 was awarded the Australian University Teacher of the Year. She is the Cochair of the International Society for Music Education’s Community Music Activities Commission, is cofounder of the Asia Pacific Community Music Network, and serves on the Board
of Australia’s peak music advocacy body, Music Australia. She also serves on a range of international and national boards, including the International Journal of Music Education—Practice and the International Journal of Community Music, and is coeditor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Community Music (with Lee Higgins).
Wayne D. Bowman’s primary research interests involve philosophy of music and the philosophical exploration of issues in music education. His work is extensively informed by pragmatism, by critical theory, and by conceptions of music and music education as social practices. He is particularly concerned with music’s sociopolitical power, music and social justice, and ethically informed understandings of musical practice. Dr. Bowman’s publications include Philosophical Perspectives on Music (Oxford University Press, 1998), the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Music Education (Oxford University Press, 2012), numerous book chapters, and articles in prominent scholarly journals. His Educating Musically in a Changing World was published in Chinese by Suzhou University Press in 2014. A former editor of the journal Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education, he is also an accomplished trombonist and jazz educator. Dr. Bowman’s academic career has included positions at Brandon University (Canada), Mars Hill University (North Carolina), New York University, and the University of Toronto.
Mary Schmidt Campbell is President of Spelman College and dean emerita at New York University, having served for over two decades as dean of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. An art historian and leader in the development of cultural and educational policy, she began her career in New York as Executive Director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, a lynchpin in Harlem’s redevelopment. Public appointments include her service as Commissioner of Cultural Affairs for the City of New York, Chair of the New York State Council on the Arts, and, appointed by President Obama, Vice- Chair of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. A graduate of Swarthmore College, she received a PhD from Syracuse University. She has written and lectured widely about Black artists, cultural policy, and arts education. Currently, Dr. Campbell is completing a biography of the collage artist Romare Bearden for Oxford University Press.
Gavin Carfoot is a Lecturer in Music and Sound at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia, where he is currently postgraduate coordinator for music. As a musician, songwriter, and producer, Gavin has worked on a range of projects, from touring with swing bands, writing and producing desert reggae groups, and collaborating with pop artists from television shows such as Australian Idol and X Factor. He has worked in various community contexts with Indigenous Australian musicians, and recently collaborated with the Brisbane Multicultural Arts Centre on an intercultural recording project called Echoes. His collaborative work in arts-based service learning won a Griffith Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2012, and his research has been published in forums such as Leonardo Music Journal, Continuum: Journal of Media and
Cultural Studies, International Education Journal, and the forthcoming Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Music Education, to name a few.
Rodney Diverlus is a Haiti-born, Florida-raised, and Toronto-based dancer, choreographer, and community organizer. Currently, Diverlus is working with Decidedly Jazz Danceworks in Calgary, Alberta, Canada’s preeminent jazz dance company. As an independent artist, Rodney has performed in and created works for a variety of companies and festivals, including the New Voices Festival, Annual Alberta Dance Festival, Cadence Ballet Company, Chimera Project’s Fresh Blood Festival, Kashe Dance, ReActive Dance Theatre, Obsidian Theatre, and Arise at Buddies and Bad Times Theatre. His creative works are influenced by and weave in jazz, contemporary, and Afro-Caribbean dance aesthetics and influences, spoken word/oral traditions, and digital media. Diverlus is a proud artivist, and his work extends beyond the studio and into the communities he lives in. Hailing from Ontario’s student and antiracist movements, he has recently finished a tenure as President of the Ryerson Students’ Union and Commissioner for the Ontario chapter of the Canadian Federation of Students, Canada’s largest student organization. Additionally, he is a cofounder and on the steering body of Black Lives Matter Toronto, the Canadian chapter of the #blacklivesmatter movement, which works to address anti-Blackness and state-sanctioned violence against the Black community in Toronto. In his work, Diverlus emphasizes the importance of acknowledging the meaningful participation of people from the margins. His areas of interest are access to education, anti-Black racism, addressing state-sanctioned violence, anticolonialism, radical arts education, community empowerment, and others.
Laura Dolp examines the historical agency of music as a site of human transformation, including music and spirituality, the interrelation of music and sociopolitical spaces, storytelling, mapping and musical practices, and the poetics of the natural world. She is editor of a reception study of Arvo Pärt (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) and co-contributor to The Cambridge Companion to Arvo Pärt (Cambridge University Press, 2012). Her articles have appeared in 19th- Century Music and the Journal of Musicological Research. Currently she is investigating the historical relationship between cartography and the musical score in a work entitled Maps and Music: Stories of the Cartographic Score. She holds a PhD in Historical Musicology from Columbia University. For more information, go to http:// lauradolp.com
David J. Elliott joined New York University in 2002 after 28 years as Professor and Chair of Music Education at the University of Toronto, Canada. He has also served as a Visiting Professor of Music Education at Northwestern University, the University of North Texas, Indiana University, the Puerto Rico Conservatory of Music, Guangzhou University, and the University of Limerick. Elliott is the author of Music Matters: A New Philosophy of Music Education (Oxford University Press, 1995), coauthor of Music Matters: A Philosophy of Music Education (Oxford University Press, 2015), and Editor of Praxial Music
Education: Reflections and Dialogues (Oxford University Press, 2005/2009). He has authored numerous book chapters and journal articles and is the Cofounder and Editor Emeritus of the International Journal of Community Music. Elliott has presented more than 300 conference keynote papers and invited lectures at university music schools around the world. He is also an award-winning composer and arranger and a professional jazz trombonist.
Born in Shiraz, Iran, Aria Fani holds a degree in comparative literature from San Diego State University. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His essays and literary translations appear regularly in Peyk, the Persian Cultural Center’s bilingual publication. His writings have been featured in PBS Tehran Bureau, Iran Nameh, Consequence, Reorient, Ajam Media Collective, and Jadaliyya. He resides in Berkeley.
Eveljn Ferraro investigates Italian national identity within transnational scenarios through the lenses of migration from and to Italy, the connections between literature and other media, liminal spaces, and postcolonial studies. Her work has appeared in the Journal of the Northeast Modern Language Association Italian Studies (NeMLA Italian Studies), Carte Italiane, and the volumes The Cultures of Italian Migration: Diverse Trajectories and Discrete Perspectives (Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011), and Small Towns, Big Cities: The Urban Experience of Italian Americans (Bordighera Press, 2010). Currently she is writing about the role of intermediality in the testimonial literary work of Italian-Jewish author Ebe Cagli Seidenberg. She is a Book Review Editor for Altreitalie, an International Journal of Studies on Italian Migrations in the World . She is Adjunct Lecturer of Italian Studies at Santa Clara University, California. She holds a PhD in Italian Studies from Brown University.
Born in Southern Spain, Coco Guzman/Coco Riot is a visual artist currently living in Toronto, Canada. Coco is the artist behind the internationally distributed project Genderpoo, an ongoing installation work questioning the notion of normalcy through washroom-sign-like drawings and community workshops. Los Fantasmas, a recent work, is a visual narration of contemporary Spanish silenced histories, and has been acclaimed both by the media and the public. Los Fantasmas is currently showing around Canada and Latin America. Coco is also the author of Llueven Queers, the first Spanish graphic novel on queer life. Coco is the founder of the community-oriented art studio Pio! in Toronto. Coco has drawings published in activist magazines such as Shameless, Bitch, and Pikara and in contemporary art magazines such as HB, Art Actuel, and .dpi.
Naomi Jackson is an Associate Professor in the School of Film, Dance and Theatre at the Herberger Institute of Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. Her articles appear in such publications as Dance Research Journal, Dance Chronicle, Contact Quarterly, and Dance Research. She has served as a member of the boards of the Society of Dance History Scholars and the Congress on Research in Dance, and has helped to organize various conferences, including the first International Dance and Human Rights Conference in Montreal in 2005. Her
books include Converging Movements: Modern Dance and Jewish Culture at the 92nd Street Y, Right to Dance/Dancing for Rights, and Dignity in Motion; Dance, Human Rights and Social Justice (edited with Toni Shapiro-Phim). Her current research is on dance and ethics.
Sandra Jeppesen is an activist-scholar who participates in social movements for radical change through direct action, grassroots organizations, and social justice research. Currently Associate Professor at Lakehead University Orillia in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, she is Program Coordinator of the Media Studies program. Participating in the Collectif de Recherche sur l’Autonomie Collective (CRAC, or Collective Autonomy Research Group) to contribute to a long-term study of antiauthoritarian groups and networks in Quebec, Jeppesen examines in her research alternative media uses in protest and social movements. She cofounded the Media Action Research Group (MARG, http://mediaactionresearch.org ), a collective researching autonomous media activists who create queer, feminist, antiracist, anticapitalist, and anticolonial media. She is also active in a group studying antiausterity protest media in Europe.
Eric Kluitenberg is a theorist, writer, and educator working at the intersection of culture, politics, media, and technology. He was a Research Fellow at the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam (2013), and formerly the head of the media program of De Balie, a center for culture and politics in Amsterdam (1999–2011). He taught theory of culture and media at the University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, and a variety of arts colleges, and was a scientific staff member at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Kluitenberg’s publications include the Network Notebook Legacies of Tactical Media (2011), Acoustic Space Vol. 11 (ed.) Techno-Ecologies (2012), Delusive Spaces (essays, 2008), The Book of Imaginary Media (2006) and the theme issues Hybrid Space (2008) and Im/ Mobility (2011) of OPEN Journal for Art and the Public Domain. Most recently he is coediting an extensive anthology on Tactical Media, together with David Garcia, which will be published by MIT Press (2016). Kluitenberg teaches cultural and media theory at the Art Science Interfaculty in The Hague, and he is the editor in chief of the Tactical Media Files, an online documentation platform for Tactical Media.
Anna Kruzynski, Associate Professor at the School of Community and Public Affairs at Concordia University, seeks to conjugate activism and intellectual work. Although she has been active in mainstream community organizations and social movements, her heart lies with the more radical fringes of the global justice movement. She was first involved with a radical feminist collective (Nemesis) and is now a member of a neighborhood-based antiauthoritarian affinity group, la Pointe libertaire. Her research activity, using participatory action research methodologies, aims to help activists document and reflect on their activism. She worked with the Popular Archives of Point St. Charles to document the history of neighborhood activism in a working-class Montreal neighborhood.
She also worked with the research group on collective autonomy (CRAC) to document self-managed, contentious feminist and radical queer groups that have emerged in Quebec since the Zapatista uprising against neoliberalism in 1994. In the years to come, Kruzynski hopes to develop a research project to explore social, economic, and political initiatives, located on Quebecois territory, that enact a postcapitalist politics.
Liz Lerman is a choreographer, performer, writer, educator and speaker, and recipient of numerous honors, including a 2002 MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship and a 2011 United States Artists Ford Fellowship in Dance. A key aspect of her artistry is opening her process to various publics, from shipbuilders to physicists, construction workers to ballerinas, resulting in both research and outcomes that are participatory, relevant, urgent, and usable by others. She founded Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 1976 and cultivated the company’s unique multigenerational ensemble into a leading force in contemporary dance until 2011. She was recently an artist in residence and visiting lecturer at Harvard University, and her current work Healing Wars is touring across the United States. Liz conducts residencies on the critical response process, creative research, the intersection of art and science, and the building of narrative within dance performance at such institutions as Yale School of Drama, Wesleyan University, University of Maryland— College Park, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and the National Theatre Studio, among many others. Her collection of essays, Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes From a Choreographer, was published in 2011 by Wesleyan University Press and released in paperback in 2014.
Tyson E. Lewis is an Associate Professor of Art Education at the University of North Texas. His research focuses on educational logics that interrupt, suspend, and render inoperative contemporary constructs of learning, lifelong learning, and the learning society. In particular, he is concerned with the disruptive possibilities that open up within education when we turn our attention to the aesthetics of teaching, the unique pedagogies of the arts, and the relation between art, politics, and subjectification. His articles have appeared in numerous journals including the Journal of Aesthetic Education, Studies in Art Education, the Journal of Philosophy of Education, and Educational Theory. He is also author of the book The Aesthetics of Education: Theatre, Curiosity, and Politics in the Work of Jacques Rancière and Paulo Freire (Continuum, 2012) and, along with Megan Laverty, is coeditor of Art’s Teachings, Teaching’s Arts: Philosophical, Critical, and Educational Musings (Springer, forthcoming).
David Montgomery is the director of the Program in Educational Theatre in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development at New York University (NYU). He is a specialist in drama education, theater for young audiences, directing, new play development, arts-based research, teacher training, and drama across the curriculum. As an actor and singer, Montgomery has performed in numerous professional venues before working as a K-12 teaching artist in New York City and full-time middle school drama teacher at I.S. 292
in Brooklyn, New York. Dr. Montgomery is also the artistic director of the New Plays for Young Audiences (NPYA) series at the Provincetown Playhouse, a project where three new plays written by leading playwrights for young audiences are developed every summer. In addition to directing numerous theater productions, Montgomery directed the Looking for Shakespeare (LFS) program, where high school students worked with him and graduate students from NYU to shape an original production of Shakespeare. Dr. Montgomery has written journal articles and collaborated on two chapters in Teaching US History: Dialogues Among Social Studies Teachers and Historians, published by Routledge (2009). In 2012, he published a book cowritten with Dr. Robert Landy, director of the Drama Therapy at NYU, entitled Theatre for Change: Education, Social Action, Therapy (Palgrave Macmillan).
Diane Mullin is Senior Curator at the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota. Her curatorial work focuses on modern and contemporary art. Mullin holds a PhD and an MA in Art History from Washington University in St. Louis. Her graduate research considered gender issues in 1970s body art and changing notions of subjectivity in midcentury American art and culture, as evidenced in particular by Robert Rauschenberg’s earliest work (1948–1953). She has curated numerous exhibitions including SAD: Illuminating a Northern View of Darkness (2007), Paul Shambroom: Picturing Power (2008), Common Sense: Art and the Quotidian (2010), and Local Time (2015). Mullin was assistant professor of liberal and critical studies and director of the MCAD Gallery at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design from 1995 to 2004. She is a member of the graduate faculty at the University of Minnesota and is adjunct professor in the MCAD MFA program. She regularly publishes in art and scholarly journals and sits on art selection juries nationally.
Yaara Ozery is a film scholar and PhD student at the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University, Israel. She teaches film theory and Israeli cinema at Tel Aviv University and Sapir College. Her master’s thesis focuses on the ethics and aesthetics of reenactment in recent Israeli documentary cinema. She is currently investigating the politics and aesthetics of contemporary Israeli women’s cinema.
Jennifer Parker is Associate Professor of Art at the University of California Santa Cruz. She is the Founding Director of UCSC OpenLab: Art and Science Research Center and currently serves as Art Department Chair and faculty member for the Digital Arts & New Media (DANM) program. Parker has been running the DANM Mechatronics collaborative research cohort since 2009, developing interactive projects that combine art, design, science, and technology. Her work has been presented nationally and internationally. She is the recipient of several grants, awards, and fellowships including Artworks NEA, Art Matters, the New Forms Regional Grant administered by the Inter-Arts Program of the NEA, the New Jersey State Council of the Arts, and the Kate Neal Kinely Memorial Fellowship Award.
Researcher and performance artist Sibylle Peters studied literature, cultural studies, and philosophy, and worked at the universities of Hamburg, Munich, Berlin (FU), Bale, Wales, and Gießen. She is currently codirector of the PhD program Performing Citizenship in Hamburg. As a freelance performance artist, she directed lecture performances and performance projects in cooperation with the geheimagentur performance collective. Peters is founder and director of the Forschungstheater/Theatre of Research situated at the Fundus Theater Hamburg, a theater where children, artists, and scientists collaborate as researchers.
Nicola Shaughnessy is Professor of Performance and Founder and Director of the Centre for Cognition, Kinesthetics, and Performance at the University of Kent. Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of contemporary performance, applied and socially engaged theater, autobiographical drama, and the intersections between cognitive neuroscience and theater. Her work on the potential of performance to engage with neuropsychologies involves interdisciplinary collaborations in health and education contexts. She was Principal Investigator for the AHRC-funded project “Imagining Autism: Drama, Performance and Intermediality as Interventions for Autism.” Her most recent publications include Applying Performance: Live Art, Socially Engaged Theatre, and Affective Practice (Palgrave, 2012) and the edited collection Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain, and Being (Methuen, 2013). She is series editor (with Professor John Lutterbie) for Methuen’s Performance and Science volumes for which she is contributing a new collection: Performing Psychologies: Imagination, Creativity, and Dramas of the Mind.
Martin Scherzinger is a composer and associate professor of Media Studies at New York University. He works on sound, music, media, and politics of the 20th and 21st centuries, with a particular focus on the music of Europe, Africa, and America, as well as global biographies of sound and other ephemera circulating in geographically remote regions. The research includes the examination of links between political economy and digital sound technologies, poetics of copyright law in diverse sociotechnical environments, relations between aesthetics and censorship, sensory limits of mass-mediated music, mathematical geometries of musical time, histories of sound in philosophy, and the politics of biotechnification.
A Czech/Nepali media maker, dancer, and scholar, Sangita Shresthova is the Director of the Henry Jenkins Media, Activism & Participatory Politics (MAPP) project based at the University of Southern California. Her work focuses on the intersection between popular culture, performance, new media, politics, and globalization. She is a coauthor of By Any Media Necessary, a forthcoming book on innovative youth-led civic action. Her earlier book on Bollywood dance and globalization (Is It All About Hips?) was published by SAGE Publications in 2011. She also founded Bollynatyam and continues to explore dance and media through this platform. Her work has been presented in academic and creative venues around the world including the Schaubuehne (Berlin), the Other Festival
(Chennai), and the American Dance Festival (Durham, North Carolina). Her recent research has focused on performance through digital media, storytelling, surveillance among American Muslim youth, and the achievements and challenges faced by Invisible Children pre– and post–Kony 2012.
Marissa Silverman is Associate Professor at the John J. Cali School of Music, Montclair State University, New Jersey. A Fulbright Scholar, Dr. Silverman has published invited chapters in recent Oxford University Research Handbooks, as well as journal articles in the International Journal of Music Education, the British Journal of Music Education, Research Studies in Music Education, Music Education Research, the International Journal of Community Music, Visions of Research in Music Education, and The New York Times. Her research agenda focuses on dimensions of music education philosophy, general music, artistic interpretation, music teacher education, community music, and interdisciplinary curriculum development. Silverman is coauthor (with David Elliott) of the second edition of Music Matters: A Philosophy of Music Education (Oxford University Press), and is coeditor of Community Music Today (Rowman & Littlefield). As a secondary school teacher, Silverman taught band, general music, and English literature at Long Island City High School (Queens, New York).
Kyle “Guante” Tran Myhre is a hip-hop artist, two-time National Poetry Slam champion, activist, educator, and writer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His works have appeared on Upworthy, MSNBC, Racialicious, Feministing, MPR, Everyday Feminism, and the Progressive, and he has performed everywhere from the United Nations to the Soundset hip-hop festival to hundreds of colleges, clubs, and theaters across the country. Unapologetically social justice minded, he has shared stages with artists like Talib Kweli, Saul Williams, Brother Ali, Dead Prez, Sage Francis, Andrea Gibson, and many more. Guante serves as a teaching artist on the rosters of COMPAS and TruArtSpeaks (where he is Communication Director), engages in writing and performance residencies with youth, as well as regularly facilitates workshops and classes on a range of social justice issues. He also writes regularly at http://www.guante.info, or follow him on Twitter at @elguante.
Thomas Turino was Professor of Musicology and Anthropology from 1987 to 2012 at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. He received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 1987. He published Moving Away From Silence: The Music of the Peruvian Altiplano and the Experience of Urban Migration (University of Chicago Press, 1993) and Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe (Chicago, 2000) for which he received the Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. He coedited the book Identity and the Arts in Diaspora Communities (Harmonie Park Press, 2004), funded by a multiyear grant from the Ford Foundation. In 2008, he published Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation (University of Chicago) and Music in the Andes: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture (Oxford University Press). He is the author of many articles in journals and has contributed chapters
to numerous books and scholarly encyclopedias. Since his retirement he has been performing kena and charango in an Andean trio; button accordion and fiddle in a Cajun band; old-time music on banjo, guitar, and fiddle; and Zimbabwean music on mbira. Recent recordings are Matt and Tom Turino: Here and Far Away (2008), Euphor (2012), Charlie the Hat (2013), Hathaways & Tom Turino: Peruvian Music Project (2013), and Tom and Matt Turino: Real Time (2014).
Ana Vujanović is a freelance cultural worker—researcher, writer, lecturer, dramaturge, and curator—in the fields of contemporary performing arts and culture who is based in Berlin and Belgrade. She holds a PhD in Theatre Studies from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, Belgrade. She is a cofounder and a member of the editorial collective of TkH (Walking Theory), the Belgrade-based theoretical-artistic platform, and chief editor of TkH Journal for Performing Arts Theory. Her particular commitment has been to empower the independent scenes in Belgrade and former Yugoslavia (Druga scena and Clubture regija). She has lectured and given workshops at various universities and independent educational programs throughout Europe (Belgrade, Ljubljana, Amsterdam, Madrid, Giessen, Berlin, Bilbao, etc.) and has been an international visiting professor at the Performance Studies Department of the University Hamburg (2012–2015). She engages in artworks in the fields of performance, theater, dance, and video/ film, as dramaturge, coauthor, and artistic collaborator. She publishes regularly in journals and collections (TkH, Maska, Frakcija, Teatron, Performance Research, TDR, etc.) and is the author of four books: Destroying Performance Signifiers, An Introduction to Performance Studies with A. Jovićević, Doxicid, and Public Sphere by Performance with B. Cvejić. In recent years her research interest has been focused on the intersections between performance and politics in neoliberal capitalist societies, and she is currently researching the performance of the self in the 21st century. See http://www.anavujanovic.info/
David Wiles is Professor of Drama at the University of Exeter. He studied at Cambridge and Bristol, and spent many years teaching in the Department of Drama at Royal Holloway University of London. His historical research has focused on Elizabethan theater (including Shakespeare’s Clown, 1987) and on classical Greek theater, where he has taken a special interest in questions of mask and performance space. His Greek Theatre Performance (2000) became a widely used student text. His Short History of Western Performance Space (2007) related different spatial configurations of performance to different social functions, and this overview was complemented by his short monograph Theatre & Time (2014). As lead editor of the Cambridge Companion to Theatre History (2013), he showed why the long historical view matters in a world obsessed with the present. In Theatre and Citizenship: The History of a Practice (2011), he explored the tension between two key ideas: that theater is a vehicle for ideas and debate, and that theater is a tool for social bonding. He argued that citizenship should be understood not as an idea but as an activity, a mode of performing one’s part in society; thus, the performance of theater is the performance of citizenship. He is currently
working on the history of acting, tracing the close convergence between the art of acting and the art of public speaking.
Raz Yosef is Associate Professor and Chair of the cinema studies BA program at the Film and Television Department, Tel Aviv University, Israel. He is the author of Beyond Flesh: Queer Masculinities and Nationalism in Israeli Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2004) and The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema (Routledge, 2011) and the coeditor of Just Images: Ethics and the Cinematic (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011) and Deeper Than Oblivion: Trauma and Memory in Israeli Cinema (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). His work on gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, ethics and trauma in Israeli national visual culture has appeared in GLQ, Third Text, Framework, Shofar, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Camera Obscura, and Cinema Journal
Artistic Citizenship
Artistic Citizenship
Introduction, Aims, and Overview
DAVID J. ELLIOTT, MARISSA SILVERMAN, AND WAYNE D. BOWMAN n
This volume gathers scholars, artists (amateurs and professionals), arts educators (in schools and communities), and community activists across the arts (dance, music, poetry, social media, theater, and visual art) to consider, clarify, and critique the proposition that the arts can and should be “put to work” toward the positive transformation of people’s lives in local, regional, and international contexts. This proposition is rooted in a shared belief that the arts are fundamentally social phenomena and always have been. Artistic practices and artistic values existed long before the emergence of the 18th-century, European notion of “art for art’s sake.” According to that misguided idea (which for many has unfortunately become something more akin to doctrine), the true or legitimate values of art are “intrinsic”—residing exclusively in supposedly internal or aesthetic properties of entities considered to be “works of art.” On this view, values that relate to concerns outside the work are “extrinsic”: of merely subsidiary or subordinate value. Their significance is extra-artistic, perhaps even nonartistic.
Unfortunately, this view relegates many of art’s most powerful social, political, ethical, and moral values to residual or extra-artistic status. This notion is not just misleading; it is implausible and irresponsible, leading us to trivialize or marginalize some of art’s most powerful contributions to our shared humanity. Social/ethical responsibility lies at the heart of responsible artistic practice, a view to which the contributors to this volume speak eloquently and with considerable urgency.
One does not need to look far for evidence to counter the notion that art’s true value is necessarily intrinsic, resident solely in entities regarded as works. There is copious archeological evidence that our earliest human ancestors—perhaps as long as 100,000 years ago— engaged in what most reasonable people would recognize as creative artistic endeavors: dancing, drawing, music making, painting,
sculpting, and so forth. Bona fide artistic endeavors existed and thrived long before the notion that their truest values should be intrinsic in nature. i n music’s case, for instance, music-like artifacts—stone percussion instruments and percussion activities—were already part of the personal–musical–social–cultural practices of our ancestors when they moved out of their original African habitats approximately 120,000 years ago (Cross, 2011; Huron, 2003, 2006). We have clear evidence that ancient humans constructed drums, rattles, and (later) flutes 40,000 to 60,000 years ago, and it is not unreasonable to speculate, as some scholars have (Cross, 2011; Huron, 2003, 2006), that music-like vocalizing or “singing” was a common human practice even earlier. Artistic practices were vital, dynamic aspects of human culture long before the advent of art “works” and their supposedly intrinsic value.
Why would our ancestors engage in “impractical” diversions like these amidst the overwhelming challenges of mere survival? did they make music to create works of art or to respond aesthetically to music’s intrinsic values, as 18thcentury European theorists argued? not likely. The literature that deals with the origins and evolution of music supports the thesis that music was vital to early humans’ survival because musical practices promote constructive, prosocial, in-group behavior; bonding; and group cohesion. Humans, like most other primates, are social beings who have an innate desire and survival need to live in groups where individuality and competition are balanced with cooperation and bonding. Much of music’s historical import, then, stems from its practical value, a claim that is equally applicable to early forms of human visual art, dance, drama, and the like.
The social cohesion theory proposes that music originated and evolved because of its remarkable power to promote and maintain coordinated, intragroup, and intersubjective relationships—values that art-for-art’s-sake advocates would have us regard as extrinsic, secondary, and fortuitous. But why is music so extraordinarily effective at promoting social bonding and group cohesion? The answer is not to be found in aesthetic responses to a work’s formal properties but in the emotionality and sociality of music making and listening, and in the ways we respond to familiar sound. Humans respond emotionally to familiar musical sounds and actions they understand (Elliott & Silverman, 2012; Gabrielsson, 2001; Huron, 2006). As psychophysiologists Jaak Panksepp and Gunther Bernatzky (2002) put it, “if we did not possess the kinds of socialemotional brains that we do, human music would probably be little more than cognitively interesting sequences of sound and, at worst, irritating cacophonies” (p. 151). The same basic theory may well apply to the other arts, with art-specific emendations: Familiar sequences, patterns, and actions are crucial to the creation and preservation of shared identity—both individual and collective.
An unavoidable consequence of conceiving “musics” (all music, everywhere), visual arts, dancing, and other arts as social human practices—as distinct from entities whose intrinsic qualities afford aesthetic gratification—is concern for what kind of cohesion, togetherness, or identity these action patterns nurture and sustain. What kinds of collective identity do artistic practices powerfully
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“She didn’t like it.”
“No ... she thought the boys stupid.”
“They’re very much like all boys of their age. It’s not an interesting time.”
Sybil frowned a little. “Thérèse doesn’t think so. She says all they have to talk about is their clubs and drinking ... neither subject is of very much interest.”
“They might have been, if you’d lived here always ... like the other girls. You and Thérèse see it from the outside.” The girl didn’t answer, and Olivia asked: “You don’t think I was wrong in sending you to France to school?”
Quickly Sybil looked up. “Oh, no ... no,” she said, and then added with smoldering eagerness, “I wouldn’t have changed it for anything in the world.”
“I thought you might enjoy life more if you saw a little more than one corner of it.... I wanted you to be away from here for a little time.” (She did not say what she thought—“because I wanted you to escape the blight that touches everything at Pentlands.”)
“I’m glad,” the girl replied. “I’m glad because it makes everything different.... I can’t explain it.... Only as if everything had more meaning than it would have otherwise.”
Suddenly Olivia kissed her daughter and said: “You’re a clever girl; things aren’t wasted on you. And now go along to bed. I’ll stop in to say good-night.”
She watched the girl as she moved away through the big empty hall past the long procession of Pentland family portraits, thinking all the while that beside them Sybil seemed so fresh and full of warm eager life; and when at last she turned, she encountered her father-in-law and old Mrs. Soames moving along the narrow passage that led from the writing-room. It struck her sharply that the gaunt, handsome old John Pentland seemed really old to-night, in a way he had never been before, old and a little bent, with purplish circles under his bright black eyes.
Old Mrs. Soames, with her funny, intricate, dyed-black coiffure and rouged cheeks and sagging chin supported by a collar of pearls, leaned on his arm—the wreck of a handsome woman who had fallen back upon such silly, obvious tricks as rouge and dye—a vain, tragic old woman who never
knew that she was a figure of fun. At sight of her, there rose in Olivia’s mind a whole vista of memories—assembly after assembly with Mrs. Soames in stomacher and tiara standing in the reception line bowing and smirking over rites that had survived in a provincial fashion some darker, more barbaric, social age.
And the sight of the old man walking gently and slowly, out of deference to Mrs. Soames’ infirmities, filled Olivia with a sudden desire to weep.
John Pentland said, “I’m going to drive over with Mrs. Soames, Olivia dear. You can leave the door open for me.” And giving his daughter-in-law a quick look of affection he led Mrs. Soames away across the terrace to his motor.
It was only after they had gone that Olivia discovered Sabine standing in the corridor in her brilliant green dress watching the two old people from the shadow of one of the deep-set windows. For a moment, absorbed in the sight of John Pentland helping Mrs. Soames with a grim courtliness into the motor, neither of them spoke, but as the motor drove away down the long drive under the moon-silvered elms, Sabine sighed and said, “I can remember her as a great beauty ... a really great beauty. There aren’t any more like her, who make their beauty a profession. I used to see her when I was a little girl. She was beautiful—like Diana in the hunting-field. They’ve been like that for ... for how long.... It must be forty years, I suppose.”
“I don’t know,” said Olivia quietly. “They’ve been like that ever since I came to Pentlands.” (And as she spoke she was overcome by a terrible feeling of sadness, of an abysmal futility. It had come to her more and more often of late, so often that at times it alarmed her lest she was growing morbid.)
Sabine was speaking again in her familiar, precise, metallic voice. “I wonder,” she said, “if there has ever been anything....”
Olivia, divining the rest of the question, answered it quickly, interrupting the speech. “No ... I’m sure there’s never been anything more than we’ve seen.... I know him well enough to know that.”
For a long time Sabine remained thoughtful, and at last she said: “No ... I suppose you’re right. There couldn’t have been anything. He’s the last of the Puritans.... The others don’t count. They go on pretending, but they don’t believe any more. They’ve no vitality left. They’re only hypocrites and shadows.... He’s the last of the royal line.”
She picked up her silver cloak and, flinging it about her fine white shoulders, said abruptly: “It’s almost morning. I must get some sleep. The time’s coming when I have to think about such things. We’re not as young as we once were, Olivia.”
On the moonlit terrace she turned and asked: “Where was O’Hara? I didn’t see him.”
“No ... he was asked. I think he didn’t come on account of Anson and Aunt Cassie.”
The only reply made by Sabine was a kind of scornful grunt. She turned away and entered her motor. The ball was over now and the last guest gone, and she had missed nothing—Aunt Cassie, nor old John Pentland, nor O’Hara’s absence, nor even Higgins watching them all in the moonlight from the shadow of the lilacs.
The night had turned cold as the morning approached and Olivia, standing in the doorway, shivered a little as she watched Sabine enter her motor and drive away. Far across the meadows she saw the lights of John Pentland’s motor racing along the lane on the way to the house of old Mrs. Soames; she watched them as they swept out of sight behind the birch thicket and reappeared once more beyond the turnpike, and as she turned away at last it occurred to her that the life at Pentlands had undergone some subtle change since the return of Sabine.
CHAPTER II
I was Olivia’s habit (and in some way every small action at Pentlands came inevitably to be a habit) to go about the house each night before climbing the paneled stairs, to see that all was in order, and by instinct she made the little tour as usual after Sabine had disappeared, stopping here and there to speak to the servants, bidding them to go to bed and clear away in the morning. On her way she found that the door of the drawing-room, which had been open all the evening, was now, for some reason, closed.
It was a big square room belonging to the old part of the house that had been built by the Pentland who made a fortune out of equipping privateers and practising a sort of piracy upon British merchantmen—a room which in the passing of years had come to be a museum filled with the relics and souvenirs of a family which could trace its ancestry back three hundred years to a small dissenting shopkeeper who had stepped ashore on the bleak New England coast very soon after Miles Standish and Priscilla Alden. It was a room much used by all the family and had a worn, pleasant look that compensated for the monstrous and incongruous collection of pictures and furniture. There were two or three Sheraton and Heppelwhite chairs and a handsome old mahogany table, and there were a plush sofa and a vast rocking-chair of uncertain ancestry, and a hideous bronze lamp that had been the gift of Mr. Longfellow to old John Pentland’s mother. There were two execrable water-colors—one of the Tiber and the Castle San Angelo and one of an Italian village—made by Miss Maria Pentland during a tour of Italy in 1846, and a stuffed chair with tassels, a gift from old Colonel Higginson, a frigid steel engraving of the Signing of the Declaration which hung over the white mantelpiece, and a complete set of Woodrow Wilson’s History of the United States given by Senator Lodge (whom Aunt Cassie always referred to as “dear Mr. Lodge”). In this room were collected mementoes of long visits paid by Mr. Lowell and Mr. Emerson and General Curtis and other good New Englanders, all souvenirs which Olivia had left exactly as she found them when she came to the big house as the bride of Anson Pentland; and to those who knew the room and the family there was nothing unbeautiful or absurd about it. The effect was historical. On entering it one almost expected a guide to step forward and say, “Mr.
Longfellow once wrote at this desk,” and, “This was Senator Lodge’s favorite chair.” Olivia knew each tiny thing in the room with a sharp sense of intimacy.
She opened the door softly and found that the lights were still burning and, strangest of all, that her husband was sitting at the old desk surrounded by the musty books and yellowed letters and papers from which he was compiling laboriously a book known as “The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.” The sight of him surprised her, for it was his habit to retire punctually at eleven every night, even on such an occasion as this. He had disappeared hours earlier from the ball, and he still sat here in his dinner coat, though it was long after midnight.
She had entered the room so softly that he did not hear her and for a moment she remained silently looking down at him, as if undetermined whether to speak or to go quietly away. He sat with his back to her so that the sloping shoulders and the thin, ridged neck and partly bald head stood outlined against the white of the paneling. Suddenly, as if conscious of being watched, he turned and looked at her. He was a man of forty-nine who looked older, with a long horse-face like Aunt Cassie’s—a face that was handsome in a tired, yellow sort of way—and small, round eyes the color of pale-blue porcelain. At the sight of Olivia the face took on a pouting expression of sourness ... a look which she knew well as one that he wore when he meant to complain of something.
“You are sitting up very late,” she observed quietly, with a deliberate air of having noticed nothing unusual.
“I was waiting to speak to you. I want to talk with you. Please sit down for a moment.”
There was an odd sense of strangeness in their manner toward each other, as if there had never been, even years before when the children were babies, any great intimacy between them. On his part there was, too, a sort of stiff and nervous formality, rather quaint and Victorian, and touched by an odd air of timidity. He was a man who would always do not perhaps the proper thing, but the thing accepted by his world as “proper.”
It was the first time since morning that the conversation between them had emerged from the set pattern which it had followed day after day for so many years. When he said that he wanted to speak to her, it meant usually that there was some complaint to be made against the servants, more often
than not against Higgins, whom he disliked with an odd, inexplicable intensity.
Olivia sat down, irritated that he should have chosen this hour when she was tired, to make some petty comment on the workings of the house. Half without thinking and half with a sudden warm knowledge that it would annoy him to see her smoking, she lighted a cigarette; and as she sat there, waiting until he had blotted with scrupulous care the page on which he had been writing, she became conscious slowly of a strange, unaccustomed desire to be disagreeable, to create in some way an excitement that would shatter for a moment the overwhelming sense of monotony and so relieve her nerves. She thought, “What has come over me? Am I one of those women who enjoys working up scenes?”
He rose from his chair and stood, very tall and thin, with drooping shoulders, looking down at her out of the pale eyes. “It’s about Sybil,” he said. “I understand that she goes riding every morning with this fellow O’Hara.”
“That’s true,” replied Olivia quietly. “They go every morning before breakfast, before the rest of us are out.”
He frowned and assumed almost mechanically a manner of severe dignity. “And you mean to say that you have known about it all along?”
“They meet down in the meadows by the old gravel-pit because he doesn’t care to come up to the house.”
“He knows, perhaps, that he wouldn’t be welcome.”
Olivia smiled a little ironically. “I’m sure that’s the reason. That’s why he didn’t come to-night, though I asked him. You must know, Anson, that I don’t feel as you do about him.”
“No, I suppose not. You rarely do.”
“There’s no need to be unpleasant,” she said quietly.
“You seem to know a great deal about it.”
“Sybil tells me everything she does. It is much better to have it that way, I think.”
Watching him, it gave her a faint, warm sense of satisfaction to see that Anson was annoyed by her calmness, and yet she was a little ashamed, too, for wanting the excitement of a small scene, just a tiny scene, to make life
seem a little more exciting. He said, “But you know how Aunt Cassie and my father feel about O’Hara.”
Then, for the first time, Olivia began to see light in the darkness. “Your father knows all about it, Anson. He has gone with them himself on the red mare, once or twice.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“Why should I make up such a ridiculous lie? Besides, your father and I get on very well. You know that.” It was a mild thrust which had its success, for Anson turned away angrily. She had really said to him, “Your father comes to me about everything, not to you. He is not the one who objects or I should have known.” Aloud she said, “Besides, I have seen him with my own eyes.”
“Then I will take it on my own responsibility. I don’t like it and I want it stopped.”
At this speech Olivia’s brows arched ever so slightly with a look which might have been interpreted either as one of surprise or one of mockery or perhaps a little of both. For a moment she sat quite still, thinking, and at last she said, “Am I right in supposing that Aunt Cassie is at the bottom of this?” When he made no reply she continued, “Aunt Cassie must have gotten up very early to see them off.” Again a silence, and the dark little devil in Olivia urged her to say, “Or perhaps she got her information from the servants. She often does, you know.”
Slowly, while she was speaking, her husband’s face had grown more and more sour. The very color of the skin seemed to have changed so that it appeared faintly green in the light from the Victorian luster just above his narrow head.
“Olivia, you have no right to speak of my aunt in that way.”
“We needn’t go into that. I think you know that what I said was the truth.” And a slow warmth began to steal over her. She was getting beneath his skin. After all those long years, he was finding that she was not entirely gentle.
He was exasperated now and astonished. In a more gentle voice he said, “Olivia, I don’t understand what has come over you lately.”
She found herself thinking, wildly, “Perhaps he is going to soften. Perhaps there is still a chance of warmth in him. Perhaps even now, after so
long, he is going to be pleasant and kind and perhaps ... perhaps ... more.”
“You’re very queer,” he was saying. “I’m not the only one who finds you so.”
“No,” said Olivia, a little sadly. “Aunt Cassie does, too. She’s been telling all the neighborhood that I seem to be unhappy. Perhaps it’s because I’m a little tired. I’ve not had much rest for a long time now ... from Jack, from Aunt Cassie, from your father ... and ... from her.” At the last word she made a curious little half-gesture in the direction of the dark north wing of the big house.
She watched him, conscious that he was shocked and startled by her mentioning in a single breath so many things which they never discussed at Pentlands, things which they buried in silence and tried to destroy by pretending that they did not exist.
“We ought to speak of those things, sometimes,” she continued sadly. “Sometimes when we are entirely alone with no one about to hear, when it doesn’t make any difference. We can’t pretend forever that they don’t exist.”
For a time he was silent, groping obviously, in a kind of desperation for something to answer. At last he said feebly, “And yet you sit up all night playing bridge with Sabine and old Mrs. Soames and Father.”
“That does me good. You must admit that it is a change at least.”
But he only answered, “I don’t understand you,” and began to pace up and down in agitation while she sat there waiting, actually waiting, for the thing to work itself up to a climax. She had a sudden feeling of victory, of intoxication such as she had not known in years, not since she was a young girl; and at the same time she wanted to laugh, wildly, hysterically, at the sight of Anson, so tall and thin, prancing up and down.
Opposite her he halted abruptly and said, “And I can see no good in inviting Mrs. Soames here so often.”
She saw now that the tension, the excitement between them, was greater even than she had imagined, for Anson had spoken of Mrs. Soames and his father, a thing which in the family no one ever mentioned. He had done it quite openly, of his own free will.
“What harm can it do now? What difference can it make?” she asked. “It is the only pleasure left to the poor battered old thing, and one of the few
left to your father.”
Anson began to mutter in disgust. “It is a silly affair ... two old ... old....” He did not finish the sentence, for there was only one word that could have finished it and that was a word which no gentleman and certainly no Pentland ever used in referring to his own father.
“Perhaps,” said Olivia, “it is a silly affair now.... I’m not so sure that it always was.”
“What do you mean by that? Do you mean....” Again he fumbled for words, groping to avoid using the words that clearly came into his mind. It was strange to see him brought face to face with realities, to see him grow so helpless and muddled. “Do you mean,” he stammered, “that my father has ever behaved ...” he choked and then added, “dishonorably.”
“Anson ... I feel strangely like being honest to-night ... just for once ... just for once.”
“You are succeeding only in being perverse.”
“No ...” and she found herself smiling sadly, “unless you mean that in this house ... in this room....” She made a gesture which swept within the circle of her white arm all that collection of Victorian souvenirs, all the mementoes of a once sturdy and powerful Puritan family, “...in this room to be truthful and honest is to be perverse.”
He would have interrupted her here, angrily, but she raised her hand and continued, “No, Anson; I shall tell you honestly what I think ... whether you want to hear it or not. I don’t hope that it will do any good.... I do not know whether, as you put it, your father has behaved dishonorably or not. I hope he has.... I hope he was Mrs. Soames’ lover in the days when love could have meant something to them.... Yes ... something fleshly is exactly what I mean.... I think it would have been better. I think they might have been happy ... really happy for a little time ... not just living in a state of enchantment when one day is exactly like the next.... I think your father, of all men, has deserved that happiness....” She sighed and added in a low voice, “There, now you know!”
For a long time he simply stood staring at the floor with the round, silly blue eyes which sometimes filled her with terror because they were so like the eyes of that old woman who never left the dark north wing and was known in the family simply as she, as if there was very little that was
human left in her. At last he muttered through the drooping mustache, as if speaking to himself, “I can’t imagine what has happened to you.”
“Nothing,” said Olivia. “Nothing. I am the same as I have always been, only to-night I have come to the end of saying ‘yes, yes’ to everything, of always pretending, so that all of us here may go on living undisturbed in our dream ... believing always that we are superior to every one else on the earth, that because we are rich we are powerful and righteous, that because ... oh, there is no use in talking.... I am just the same as I have always been, only to-night I have spoken out. We all live in a dream here ... a dream that some day will turn sharply into a nightmare. And then what will we do? What will you do ... and Aunt Cassie and all the rest?”
In her excitement her cheeks grew flushed and she stood up, very tall and beautiful, leaning against the mantelpiece; but her husband did not notice her. He appeared to be lost in deep thought, his face contorted with a kind of grim concentration.
“I know what has happened,” he said presently. “It is Sabine. She should never have come back here. She was like that always ... stirring up trouble ... even as a little girl. She used to break up our games by saying: ‘I won’t play house. Who can be so foolish as to pretend muddy water is claret! It’s a silly game.’ ”
“Do you mean that she is saying it again now ... that it’s a silly game to pretend muddy water is claret?”
He turned away without answering and began again to pace up and down over the enormous faded roses of the old Victorian carpet. “I don’t know what you’re driving at. All I know is that Sabine ... Sabine ... is an evil woman.”
“Do you hate Sabine because she is a friend of mine?”
She had watched him for so many years disliking the people who were her friends, managing somehow to get rid of them, to keep her from seeing them, to force her into those endless dinners at the houses of the safe men he knew, the men who had gone to his college and belonged to his club, the men who would never do anything that was unexpected. And in the end she had always done as he wanted her to do. It was perhaps a manifestation of his resentment toward all those whom he could not understand and even (she thought) feared a little—the attitude of a man who will not allow others to enjoy what he could not take for himself. It was the first time she had
ever spoken of this dog-in-the-manger game, but she found herself unable to keep silent. It was as if some power outside her had taken possession of her body. She had a strange sensation of shame at the very moment she spoke, of shame at the sound of her own voice, a little strained and hysterical.
There was something preposterous, too, in the sight of Anson prancing up and down the old room filled with all the souvenirs of that decayed respectability in which he wrapped himself ... prancing up and down with all his prejudices and superstitions bristling. And now Olivia had dragged the truth uncomfortably into the light.
“What an absurd thing to say!” he said bitterly.
Olivia sighed. “No, I don’t think so.... I think you know exactly what I mean.” (She knew the family game of pretending never to understand a truthful, unpleasant statement.)
But this, too, he refused to answer. Instead, he turned to her, more savage and excited than she had ever seen him, so moved that he seemed for a second to attain a pale flash of power and dignity. “And I don’t like that Fiji Islander of a daughter of hers, who has been dragged all over the world and had her head filled with barbaric ideas.”
At the sight of him and the sound of his voice Olivia experienced a sudden blinding flash of intuition that illuminated the whole train of their conversation, indeed, the whole procession of the years she had spent here at Pentlands or in the huge brownstone house in Beacon Street. She knew suddenly what it was that frightened Anson and Aunt Cassie and all that intricate world of family. They were terrified lest the walls, the very foundations, of their existence be swept away leaving them helpless with all their little prides and vanities exposed, stripped of all the laws and prejudices which they had made to protect them. It was why they hated O’Hara, an Irishman and a Roman Catholic. He had menaced their security. To be exposed thus would be a calamity, for in any other world save their own, in a world where they stood unprotected by all that money laid away in solid trust funds, they would have no existence whatever. They would suddenly be what they really were.
She saw sharply, clearly, for the first time, and she said quietly, “I think you dislike Thérèse for reasons that are not fair to the girl. You distrust her because she is different from all the others ... from the sort of girls that you
were trained to believe perfect. Heaven knows there are enough of them about here ... girls as like as peas in a pod.”
“And what about this boy who is coming to stay with Sabine and her daughter ... this American boy with a French name who has never seen his own country until now? I suppose he’ll be as queer as all the others. Who knows anything about him?”
“Sabine,” began Olivia.
“Sabine!” he interrupted. “Sabine! What does she care who he is or where he comes from? She’s given up decent people long ago, when she went away from here and married that Levantine blackguard of a husband. Sabine!... Sabine would only like to bring trouble to us ... the people to whom she belongs. She hates us.... She can barely speak to me in a civil fashion.”
Olivia smiled quietly and tossed her cigarette into the ashes beneath the cold steel engraving of the Signing. “You are beginning to talk nonsense, Anson. Let’s stick to facts, for once. I’ve met the boy in Paris.... Sybil knew him there. He is intelligent and handsome and treats women as if they were something more than stable-boys. There are still a few of us left who like to be treated thus ... as women ... a few of us even here in Durham. No, I don’t imagine you’ll care for him. He won’t belong to your club or to your college, and he’ll see life in a different way. He won’t have had his opinions all ready made, waiting for him.”
“It’s my children I’m thinking of.... I don’t want them picking up with any one, with the first person who comes along.”
Olivia did not smile. She turned away now and said softly, “If it’s Jack you’re worrying about, you needn’t fuss any longer. He won’t marry Thérèse. I don’t think you know how ill he is.... I don’t think, sometimes, that you really know anything about him at all.”
“I always talk with the doctors.”
“Then you ought to know that they’re silly ... the things you’re saying.”
“All the same, Sabine ought never to have come back here....”
She saw now that the talk was turning back into the inevitable channel of futility where they would go round and round, like squirrels in a cage, arriving nowhere. It had happened this way so many times. Turning with an air of putting an end to the discussion, she walked over to the fireplace ...
pale once more, with faint, mauve circles under her dark eyes. There was a fragility about her, as if this strange spirit which had flamed up so suddenly were too violent for the body.
“Anson,” she said in a low voice, “please let’s be sensible. I shall look into this affair of Sybil and O’Hara and try to discover whether there is anything serious going on. If necessary, I shall speak directly to both of them. I don’t approve, either, but not for the same reason. He is too old for her. You won’t have any trouble. You will have to do nothing.... As to Sabine, I shall continue to see as much of her as I like.”
In the midst of the speech she had grown suddenly, perilously, calm in the way which sometimes alarmed her husband and Aunt Cassie. Sighing a little, she continued, “I have been good and gentle, Anson, for years and years, and now, to-night ... to-night I feel as if I were coming to the end of it.... I only say this to let you know that it can’t go on forever.”
Picking up her scarf, she did not wait for him to answer her, but moved away toward the door, still enveloped in the same perilous calm. In the doorway she turned. “I suppose we can call the affair settled for the moment?”
He had been standing there all the while watching her out of the round cold blue eyes with a look of astonishment as if after all those years he had seen his wife for the first time; and then slowly the look of astonishment melted into one of slyness, almost of hatred, as if he thought, “So this is what you really are! So you have been thinking these things all these years and have never belonged to us at all. You have been hating us all the while. You have always been an outsider—a common, vulgar outsider.”
His thin, discontented lips had turned faintly gray, and when he spoke it was nervously, with a kind of desperation, like a small animal trapped in a corner. The words came out from the thin lips in a sharp, quick torrent, like the rush of white-hot steel released from a cauldron ... words spoken in a voice that was cold and shaken with hatred.
“In any case,” he said, “in any case ... I will not have my daughter marry a shanty Irishman.... There is enough of that in the family.”
For a moment Olivia leaned against the door-sill, her dark eyes wide with astonishment, as if she found it impossible to believe what she had heard. And then quietly, with a terrible sadness and serenity in her voice, she murmured almost to herself, “What a rotten thing to say!” And after a
little pause, as if still speaking to herself, “So that is what you have been thinking for twenty years!” And again, “There is a terrible answer to that.... It’s so terrible that I shan’t say it, but I think you ... you and Aunt Cassie know well enough what it is.”
Closing the door quickly, she left him there, startled and exasperated, among all the Pentland souvenirs, and slowly, in a kind of nightmare, she made her way toward the stairs, past the long procession of Pentland ancestors—the shopkeeping immigrant, the witch-burner, the professional evangelist, the owner of clipper ships, and the tragic, beautiful Savina Pentland—and up the darkened stairway to the room where her husband had not followed her in more than fifteen years.
Once in her own room she closed the door softly and stood in the darkness, listening, listening, listening.... There was at first no sound save the blurred distant roar of the surf eating its way into the white dunes and the far-off howling of a beagle somewhere in the direction of the kennels, and then, presently, there came to her the faint sound of soft, easy breathing from the adjoining room. It was regular, easy and quiet, almost as if her son had been as strong as O’Hara or Higgins or that vigorous young de Cyon whom she had met once for a little while at Sabine’s house in Paris.
The sound filled her with a wild happiness, so that she forgot even what had happened in the drawing-room a little while before. As she undressed in the darkness she stopped now and then to listen again in a kind of fierce tension, as if by wishing it she could keep the sound from ever dying away. For more than three years she had never once entered this room free from the terror that there might only be silence to welcome her. And at last, after she had gone to bed and was falling asleep, she was wakened sharply by another sound, quite different, the sound of a wild, almost human cry ... savage and wicked, and followed by the thud thud of hoofs beating savagely against the walls of a stall, and then the voice of Higgins, the groom, cursing wickedly. She had heard it before—the sound of old John Pentland’s evil, beautiful red mare kicking the walls of her stall and screaming wildly. There was an unearthly, implacable hatred between her and the little apelike man ... and yet a sort of fascination, too. As she sat up in her bed, listening, and still startled by the wild sound, she heard her son saying:
“Mama, are you there?”
“Yes.”
She rose and went into the other room, where, in the dim light from the night-lamp, the boy was sitting up in bed, his pale blond hair all rumpled, his eyes wide open and staring a little.
“You’re all right, Jack?” she whispered. “There’s nothing the matter?”
“No—nothing. I had a bad dream and then I heard the red mare.”
He looked pale and ill, with the blue veins showing on his temples; yet she knew that he was stronger than he had been for months. He was fifteen, and he looked younger than his age, rather like a boy of thirteen or fourteen, but he was old, too, in the timeless fashion of those who have always been ill.
“Is the party over?... Have they all gone?” he asked.
“Yes, Jack.... It’s almost daylight. You’d better try to sleep again.”
He lay down without answering her, and as she bent to kiss him goodnight, she heard him say softly, “I wish I could have gone to the party.”
“You will, Jack, some day—before very long. You’re growing stronger every day.”
Again a silence, while Olivia thought bitterly, “He knows that I’m lying. He knows that what I’ve said is not the truth.”
Aloud she said, “You’ll go to sleep now—like a good boy.”
“I wish you’d tell me about the party.”
Olivia sighed. “Then I must close Nannie’s door, so we won’t waken her.” And she closed the door leading to the room where the old nurse slept, and seating herself on the foot of her son’s bed, she began a recital of who had been at the ball, and what had happened there, bit by bit, carefully and with all the skill she was able to summon. She wanted to give him, who had so little chance of living, all the sense of life she was able to evoke.
She talked on and on, until presently she noticed that the boy had fallen asleep and that the sky beyond the marshes had begun to turn gray and rose and yellow with the rising day.
CHAPTER III
1
W Olivia first came to the old house as the wife of Anson Pentland, the village of Durham, which lay inland from Pentlands and the sea, had been invisible, lying concealed in a fold of the land which marked the faint beginnings of the New Hampshire mountains. There had been in the view a certain sleepy peacefulness: one knew that in the distant fold of land surmounted by a single white spire there lay a quiet village of white wooden houses built along a single street called High Street that was dappled in summer with the shadows of old elm-trees. In those days it had been a country village, half asleep, with empty shuttered houses here and there falling into slow decay—a village with fewer people in it than there had been a hundred years before. It had stayed thus sleeping for nearly seventy-five years, since the day when a great migration of citizens had robbed it of its sturdiest young people. In the thick grass that surrounded the old meeting-house there lay a marble slab recording the event with an inscription which read:
, R J M , P C , , ,
A G , H W P W W R .
Beneath the inscription were cut the names of those families who had made the journey to found a new town which had since surpassed sleepy Durham a hundred times in wealth and prosperity. There was no Pentland name among them, for the Pentlands had been rich even in the year eighteen hundred and eighteen, and lived in winter in Boston and in summer at Durham, on the land claimed from the wilderness by the first of the family.
From that day until the mills came to Durham the village sank slowly into a kind of lethargy, and the church itself, robbed of its strength, died
presently and was changed into a dusty museum filled with homely early American furniture and spinning-wheels—a place seldom visited by any one and painted grudgingly every five years by the town council because it was popularly considered an historical monument. The Pentland family long ago had filtered away into the cold faith of the Unitarians or the more compromising and easy creeds of the Episcopal church.
But now, nearly twenty years after Olivia had come to Pentlands, the village was alive again, so alive that it had overflowed its little fold in the land and was streaming down the hill on the side next to the sea in straight, plain columns of ugly stucco bungalows, each filled with its little family of Polish mill-workers. And in the town, across High Street from the whitespired old meeting-house, there stood a new church, built of stucco and green-painted wood and dedicated to the great Church of Rome. In the old wooden houses along High Street there still lingered remnants of the old families ... old Mrs. Featherstone, who did washing to support four sickly grandchildren who ought never to have been born; Miss Haddon, a queer old woman who wore a black cape and lived on a dole from old John Pentland as a remote cousin of the family; Harry Peckhan, the village carpenter; old Mrs. Malson, living alone in a damp, gaunt and beautiful old house filled with bits of jade and ivory brought back from China by her grandfather’s clippers; Miss Murgatroyd, who had long since turned her bullfinch house into a shabby tea-room. They remained here and there, a few worn and shabby-genteel descendants of those first settlers who had come into the country with the Pentlands.
But the mills had changed everything, the mills which poured wealth into the pockets of a dozen rich families who lived in summer within a few miles of Durham.
Even the countryside itself had changed. There were no longer any of the old New Englanders in possession of the land. Sometimes in riding along the lanes one encountered a thin, silly-faced remnant of the race sitting on a stone wall chewing a bit of grass; but that was all; the others had been swallowed up long ago in the mills of Salem and Lynn or died away, from too much inbreeding and too little nourishment. The few farms that remained fell into the hands of Poles and Czechs, solid, square people who were a little pagan in their closeness to the earth and the animals which surrounded them, sturdy people, not too moral, who wrought wonders with the barren, stony earth of New England and stood behind their walls staring
wide-eyed while the grand people like the Pentlands rode by in pink coats surrounded by the waving nervous tails of foxhounds. And, one by one, other old farms were being turned back into a wilderness once more so that there would be plenty of room for the horses and hounds to run after foxes and bags of aniseed.
It had all changed enormously. From the upper windows of the big Georgian brick house where the Pentlands lived, one could see the record of all the changes. The windows commanded a wide view of a landscape composed of grubby meadows and stone walls, thickets of pine and white birches, marshes, and a winding sluggish brown river. Sometimes in the late autumn the deer wandered down from the mountains of New Hampshire to spoil the fox-hunting by leading the hounds astray after game that was far too fleet for them.
And nearer at hand, nestled within a turn of the river, lay the land where Sabine Callender had been born and had lived until she was a grown woman—the land which she had sold carelessly to O’Hara, an Irish politician and a Roman Catholic, come up from nowhere to take possession of it, to clip its hedges, repair its sagging walls, paint its old buildings and put up gates and fences that were too shiny and new. Indeed, he had done it so thoroughly and so well that the whole place had a little the air of a suburban real estate development. And now Sabine had returned to spend the summer in one of his houses and to be very friendly with him in the face of Aunt Cassie and Anson Pentland, and a score of others like them.
Olivia knew this wide and somberly beautiful landscape, every stick and stone of it, from the perilous gravel-pit, half-hidden by its fringe of elderbushes, to the black pine copse where Higgins had discovered only a day or two before a new litter of foxes. She knew it on gray days when it was cold and depressing, on those bright, terribly clear New England days when every twig and leaf seemed outlined by light, and on those damp, cold days when a gray fog swept in across the marshes from the sea to envelop all the countryside in gray darkness. It was a hard, uncompromising, stony country that was never too cheerful.
It was a country, too, which gave her an old feeling of loneliness ... a feeling which, strangely enough, seemed to increase rather than diminish as the years passed. She had never accustomed herself to its occasional dreariness. In the beginning, a long while ago, it had seemed to her green
and peaceful and full of quiet, a place where she might find rest and peace ... but she had come long since to see it as it was, as Sabine had seen it while she stood in the window of the writing-room, frightened by the sudden queer apparition of the little groom—a country beautiful, hard and cold, and a little barren.
2
T were times when the memories of Olivia’s youth seemed to sharpen suddenly and sweep in upon her, overwhelming all sense of the present, times when she wanted suddenly and fiercely to step back into that far-off past which had seemed then an unhappy thing, and these were the times when she felt most lonely, the times when she knew how completely, with the passing of years, she had drawn into herself; it was a process of protection like a tortoise drawing in its head. And all the while, in spite of the smiles and the politeness and the too facile amiability, she felt that she was really a stranger at Pentlands, that there were certain walls and barriers which she could never break down, past which she could never penetrate, certain faiths in which it was impossible for her to believe.
It was difficult now for her to remember very clearly what had happened before she came to Durham; it all seemed lost, confused, buried beneath the weight of her devotion to the vast family monument of the Pentlands. She had forgotten the names of people and places and confused the days and the years. At times it was difficult for her to remember the endless confusing voyages back and forth across the Atlantic and the vast, impersonal, vacuous hotels which had followed each other in the bleak and unreal procession of her childhood.
She could remember with a certain pitiful clarity two happy years spent at the school in Saint-Cloud, where for months at a time she had lived in a single room which she might call her own, where she had rested, free from the terror of hearing her mother say, “We must pack to-day. We are leaving to-morrow for St. Petersburg or London or San Remo or Cairo....”
She could scarcely remember at all the immense house of chocolatecolored stone fitted with fantastic turrets and balconies that overlooked Lake Michigan. It had been sold and torn down long ago, destroyed like all else that belonged to the far-off past. She could not remember the father who had died when she was three; but of him there remained at least a yellowing photograph of a great, handsome, brawny man with a humorous
Scotch-Irish face, who had died at the moment when his name was coming to be known everywhere as a power in Washington. No, nothing remained of him save the old photograph, and the tenuous, mocking little smile which had come down to her, the way she had of saying, “Yes! Yes!” pleasantly when she meant to act in quite the contrary fashion.
There were times when the memory of her own mother became vague and fantastic, as if she had been no more than a figure out of some absurd photograph of the early nineteen hundreds ... the figure of a pretty woman, dressed fashionably in clothes that flowed away in both directions, from a wasp waist. It was like a figure out of one of those old photographs which one views with a kind of melancholy amusement. She remembered a vain, rather selfish and pretty woman, fond of flattery, who had been shrewd enough never to marry any one of those gallant dark gentlemen with highsounding titles who came to call at the eternal changeless hotel sittingroom, to take her out to garden parties and fêtes and races. And always in the background of the memory there was the figure of a dark little girl, overflowing with spirits and a hunger for friends, who was left behind to amuse herself by walking out with the Swiss governess, to make friends among the children she encountered in the parks or on the beaches and the boulevards of whatever European city her mother was visiting at the moment ... friends whom she saw to-day and who were vanished to-morrow never to be seen again. Her mother, she saw now, belonged to the America of the nineties. She saw her now less as a real person than a character out of a novel by Mrs. Wharton.
But she had never remarried; she had remained the rich, pretty Mrs. McConnel of Chicago until that tragic day (the clearest of all Olivia’s memories and the most terrible) when she had died of fever abruptly in a remote and squalid Italian village, with only her daughter (a girl of seventeen), a quack doctor and the Russian driver of her motor to care for her.
The procession of confused and not-too-cheerful memories came to a climax in a gloomy, red brick house off Washington Square, where she had gone as an orphan to live with a rigid, bejetted, maternal aunt who had believed that the whole world revolved about Lenox, the Hudson River Valley and Washington Square—an aunt who had never spoken to Olivia’s father because she, like Anson and Aunt Cassie, had a prejudice against
